Opinion Brief: Tuesday, October 13, 2015

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Good evening, subscribers. We’re less than a week away from election day; that rasping noise you’re hearing from the Conservative camp is the sound Stephen Harper makes when he’s scraping the bottom of his dignity barrel. The Ford brothers. Gimmicky press stops with ca-ching! sound effects. You almost have to feel bad for the guy.

Turns out L. Ian MacDonald was right on the money when he predicted that the Thanksgiving long weekend would see a sudden lurch in the polls. It happened; the Liberals now have a comfortable lead nationally and in Ontario, while the bottom seems to have dropped out of the Conservatives’ “niqab bounce” in Quebec. Now, it’s all about the 54 seats up for grabs in the GTA. “Two things are going on here. First, progressive ‘change voters’ are moving from the NDP to the Liberals. Second, Harper overplayed his hand on the identity issue last week when he mused about banning the niqab in the public service.”

Andrew Mitrovica anticipates the post-election post-mortem/civil war in the NDP camp. He says Tom Mulcair blew his lead in this campaign the same way New Democrats always throw away a lead — by pretending to be something other than rabble-rousing leftists. “Mulcair tried so hard and for so long to not be Angry Tom that he ended up turning into a quiet, cautious Humpty Tommy … so scared of making a mistake, of falling off the wall of public opinion, that he forgot about what got him to front-runner status in the first place — his passion, his intellect, his unwillingness to suffer fools.”

And UVic digital privacy expert Colin Bennett has a warning for Canadian lawmakers — whoever they turn out to be after Oct. 19: A recent European Court decision outlawing the ‘Safe Harbour’ arrangement that allows for the free transfer of personal data to the U.S. will end up shining a bright light on other laws that compromise digital privacy, such as C-51. “Canada is particularly vulnerable. The European Parliament already has raised some searching questions about the continued engagement of Canada in mass surveillance activities, as part of the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance.”